AN IMAGE SHARED on social media which shows park rangers in Death Valley in California wearing gloves and jackets and posing next to a thermometer during record temperatures was taken from a video and meant as a joke.
On 18 July, Irish conspiracy theorist and anti-climate change activist Ben Gilroy shared a still from a news report that was aired just after 7am on Ireland AM, Virgin Media One’s morning programme.
Gilroy is a far-right figure, who became known through his activities as an anti-eviction campaigner and has stood unsuccessfully on multiple occasions for election. He regularly shares false or misleading information online, and was jailed for three months in 2019 over his failure to complete an 80-hour community service order.
The report detailed some of the record-breaking temperatures being felt in areas of Europe and the US. Death Valley in California – known as one of the hottest places on Earth – featured in the report, as temperatures there rose to just over 53 degrees Celsius last week.
In the report, Death Valley Park Rangers are shown posing next to digital display showing an unofficial heat reading of 132 Fahrenheit (55 degrees Celsius) at Furnace Creek Visitor Centre in the desert.
Gilroy shared a still of this section of the report and used it to claim that reports of high temperatures were propaganda.
“Today media continue to propagandise weather showing high temperatures in Death Valley USA — yet the park rangers wear jackets and gloves?” he said on Facebook.
The elites UN climate scam is really about securing a world government plutocracy, depopulation, and severely cutting your quality of life.
Gilroy’s post received 335 likes on Facebook and was shared 126 times. The conspiracy theorist also shared the post on Twitter, where it was viewed 1.7 million times and retweeted and quote tweeted more than 350 times.
While Gilroy received some positive support from some of his 40,000 followers on Facebook, his post on Twitter was mostly derided, with many users correctly stating that Death Valley is one of the hottest places on Earth.
It has since been confirmed that park rangers were posing in front of the sign as a joke.
When contacted by The Journal, Abby Wines of the Death Valley Park Rangers said:
“The park rangers photographed last week wearing coats, hats, and gloves next to the thermometer in front of Furnace Creek Visitor Center were doing that as a joke.
However, the temperature shown is incorrect. The official high temperature that day was 128 degrees F. The display thermometer’s sensor reads a few degrees F high.
An image taken by David Becker from the ZUMA Press Wire on 16 July clearly shows the park rangers posing in front of the thermometer and pretending to be cold.
The caption with the image reads:
Park Rangers pretend to be cold as they pose in front of an unofficial-digital thermometer reading 132F degrees at the Furnace Creek Visitors’ Centre in Death Valley National Park, California on July 16, 2023.
As well as this, footage from the report used on Virgin Media One shows the rangers posing in front of the thermometer, with one saying “alright it’s hot, let’s get out of here” and removing a beanie hat he was wearing.
Temperatures reached near-record levels in Death Valley last week, while European countries have been hit over the last week by the Cerberus heatwave, which has brought oppressively high temperatures in the 30s and 40s.
The heatwave follows a record-hot start to July as the World Meteorological Organisation confirmed that the beginning of the month was the hottest week globally in modern records.
These weather events have been linked to climate change.
There is an overwhelming body of evidence and a scientific consensus that climate change has been happening since the 19th century and that global temperature changes have accelerated significantly since the middle of last century.
That is largely because of the release of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide concentrations – to the point that they are now circulating in the atmosphere at their highest level in 800,000 years.
That rise has been particularly stark since the middle of the 20th century: concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere – measured in parts per million (ppm) – have been increasing exponentially over the past 50 years so.
Scientists also agree that humans are responsible for this warming.
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